Cells

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Wake Up!Your Team Is On Fire
Why Your Real Problems Are Cultural and How To
Change Them
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Goals

• State of the nation
• Systems thinking
• Real-world practices
• Case studies
• Your homework

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Where Are We Now?
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Heroes
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Imaginary vs. Real
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External vs. Internal
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Immediate vs. Long Term
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Cancer
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calmly reflectyour team needs you
Why Your Real Problems Are Cultural and How To
Change Them
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Systems Thinking
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Reductionism
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Physical Science
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Life Science
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Language
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Finance
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Management
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Management
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The fundamental natureof the universe lies in
interconnectedness more than individual pieces.
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Feedback Loops
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Filling A Glass of Water
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From the systems perspective, the human actor is
part of the feedback process, not standing
apart from it.
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Filling A Glass of Water
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Filling A Glass of Water
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Terrorism
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Terrorism
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Terrorism
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Familiar Examples
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Crunch
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Implied Crunch
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What Game Are We Making?
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Dysfunctional Leadership
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Functional Leadership
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Real-World Practices
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Build Transparency

• Build a visual workspace
• Allow the hard questions in public
• Fight against closed doors (take hard
  conversations off-site)
• Communicate five times in five different ways
• Monthly retrospectives (start doing, stop doing,
  continue doing)
• Encourage self-organization

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Leverage Size

• Large company reach out. Three degrees of
  separation.
• People love talking about their projects and
  problems.
• Form monthly discussion calls
• World-wide communities

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Be a Teacher

• Best teachers are also students
• Present new ideas
• Create workshops for your team
• Always challenge people for growth through 11s
• Company
• Team
• Yourself

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Build Culture

• First, lead yourself
• Second, lead your supervisors
• Third, lead your peers
• All else is trivia

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Real-World Case Studies
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11s and As and Os

• Cultural issue
• Disconnected expectations
• Lack of shared vision
• Proposed cultural change
• Every person having a 11 every two weeks
• Every person has a living achievements and
  objectives document
• Make this a top priority for the team
• But how? Everyone thinks Im being corporate

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11s and As and Os

• Culture from all levels pushed back (studio,
  leads, etc)
• Understand that most have never experienced this
• Never a good time just do it
• Begin teaching my leads they learn how to run a
  valuable 11 by experiencing it from me
• Grow outward from that core

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11s and As and Os

• Result
• New communication pathway for aligning vision,
  expectations and performance
• Design team 8 of 10 people initially requested
  to be moved off the team. By the end, all eight
  had retracted this ask.
• Team transition results 93 spoke highly of
  process and requested to go to a team that would
  implement it.
• Leaders from team took the process and
  implemented it on their own on their next
  project.

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Technology Sharing

• Cultural issue
• Technology sharing is grinding metal
• People are visibly depressed
• Proposed cultural change
• The city-state model is failing in some
  circumstances
• Sometimes you just need to reevaluate who you are
  trying to share with
• Empower the team by having them pick a new
  technology to share no lets start over from
  scratch
• But how? It will never be allowed by management

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Technology Sharing

• First solution
• Ninja Weekend
• Second solution
• I have learned from that experience I am ninja
• Lead myself, my supervisors and my peers
• Go and see
• Slowly approach technology options

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Technology Sharing

• Result (1st)
• Medal of Honor Airborne switched to Unreal (Epic)
• Result (2nd)
• Mercenaries 3 has switched to Frostbite (DICE)
• Overall productivity increased

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Agile and Lean

• Cultural issues
• Uncommitted team
• Rampant micromanagement
• Command and control bottlenecks
• Slow progress
• Proposed cultural change
• Bring Agile and Lean methods to the team
• But how? Plenty of horror stories of it going
  wrong

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Agile and Lean

• Running experiments on my own project
• Morning stand-ups
• Product owners prioritizing features
• Started with a monthly discussion call between
  studios
• Evolved into a world-wide Sharepoint
• Running experiments on my own project
• Cross-disciplinary task forces
• Poker planning
• Create workshops for my team
• World-wide tours of studios
• I presented ideas
• I then met with the teams to hear their stories
• ScrumMaster training for my production team
• Running experiments on my own project
• Full Scrum process
• Value steams of workflows

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Agile and Lean

• Results
• World-wide adoption rates
• Allowing the process to evolve gave people time
  to convert information into knowledge and
  knowledge into understanding
• Fewer calls of micromanagement in team health
  surveys
• The team publicly celebrated the changes in
  retrospectives
• Visible increases in team velocity using story
  points and burndown charts

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Your Homework

• Think of your worst issues that always seem to be
  around year after year. These are most likely
  systemic.
• People management
• Disengagement
• High turnover rates
• Quality
• Quality of concept
• Quality of execution
• Understanding the marketplace
• Team organization
• Rampant micromanagement
• Constant resource stealing between projects
• Company and studios
• Inability to exploit new markets
• Rapid turnover of executives

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QA
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References

• One From Many VISA and the Rise of Chaordic
  Organization Hock
• The Birth of the Chaordic Age Hock
• Systemantics How Systems Work and Especially How
  They Fail Gall
• Linked How Everything Is Connected to Everything
  Else and What It Means - Barabasi
• The Fifth Discipline The Art Practice of the
  Learning Organization Senge
• Emergence The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains,
  Cities, and Software Johnson
• Principles of Systems Forrester
• Simplexity Why Simple Things Become Complex
  Kluger
• Complexity Life at the Edge of Chaos Lewin
• Managing Flow A Process Theory on the
  Knowledge-Based Firm Nonaka
• Mindwalk (film)
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_Theory
• TO CONTACT Michael Saladino - mikeyspeakeasy_at_yaho
  o.com